The horrors of eviction. 1827 W 9th Ave, photo from SCOUT. Art by Val Osier and Erin Sellers. Content warning: This story contains description of and reference to sexual assault.

Once the owner of five buildings, Arlin Jordin has filed hundreds of evictions in the last 20 years — nearly one for each of the 258 months of prison time he was sentenced to in 2007 for raping a potential tenant.

Jordin, 78, used to be described as one of the city’s most eligible bachelors, a decorated Vietnam war veteran and even the man with the biggest feet to ever run Bloomsday. When he walked into Clinkerdagger or pulled into a parking lot with his gold Jaguar convertible, people knew him as a man who had money — money and power.

In 2004, news broke that multiple women had accused Jordin of drugging and raping them. A chorus of women dating back to the 1980s told a similar story: they were in need of a place to live, Jordin had an apartment to rent, he invited them over to discuss the rental, and then they were drugged. Some of them described being sexually assaulted, others said they escaped.

Jordin was arrested, tried, convicted of one count of second-degree rape and eventually sent to prison. Before prison, though, he was briefly released on $100,000 bond while his case was on appeal and was moved to house arrest. He was finally taken back into custody after he violated terms of his parole by giving a potential female tenant alcohol he was not supposed to possess. He has been behind bars, first at Coyote Correctional Center and now a facility near Seattle since then.

From prison, Jordin’s tenants have stayed under his thumb. Though he committed these crimes in his buildings, using the promise of open units to lure potential victims in need of a place to live, Jordin still kept his properties; there was no law saying he couldn’t.

While incarcerated, Jordin has evicted hundreds of tenants. Despite not seeing the units in person in years, Jordin set the rent prices, decided what to charge for deposits and pet fees and made the final call on just how much unpaid rent should result in an eviction filing. When his property managers would report unpaid rent to Jordin, he would direct his lawyer to file a claim, typically for unpaid rent, with the court.

Then, one of Jordin’s staff — sometimes the attorney or his accountant, sometimes a property manager — would serve tenants with a notice to vacate. If the tenant didn’t respond to the notice in court, a default judgement was entered in Jordin’s favor, leaving tenants owing back rent, late fees, court fees and lawyer fees that amounted to much more than the unpaid rent they owed to begin with.

Within a few days or weeks, a sheriff’s officer would show up to evict the tenant.

At least 154 of Jordin’s filings have resulted in successful evictions, according to the more than 314 civil case filings RANGE reviewed. His tenants could have responded to the court to legally fight their eviction, but they rarely did; lawyers are expensive and hard to find on short notice.

Meanwhile, Jordin is a guy with multiple lawyers; his “most expensive lawyer,” told him he shouldn’t take an interview with RANGE. (He did anyway.)

Jordin may be a special case — even he told RANGE he evicts more tenants than most — but his story puts the power difference that is undercurrent to every landlord-tenant relationship in stark contrast: whoever owns the property decides whether or not the person who lives there has a roof over their head.

Rent-burdened

Across the state, the landscape for renters is bleak. Most tenants in Washington are rent-burdened — which means they have to spend over 30% of their monthly income on housing costs — and Spokane is worse than the state average: 52.1% of renters were rent-burdened, and 28.3% of renters paid more than 50% of their monthly income on housing costs.

As evictions continue to spike in Washington, state and local lawmakers have started to look more closely at this power imbalance.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, state legislators approved a yearlong eviction moratorium, preventing landlords from evicting tenants due to nonpayment of rent and requiring reasonable repayment plans to be provided to tenants following the end of the moratorium. Then, they passed the nation’s first right-to-counsel law, guaranteeing low-income tenants court-assigned legal representation in eviction proceedings.

Locally, the city council passed complementary legislation in the last two years heightening requirements for landlords before they could raise rents or evict tenants.

With newfound tenant protections, evicting tenants got harder.

Before right-to-counsel was implemented, only three of the tenants Jordin tried to evict had managed to secure legal representation. Now, nearly every single one of his tenants qualifies for a free lawyer to fight for them.

Jordin has stopped winning his cases in default judgments as the court-appointed lawyers for his tenants fight for stays of evictions, case dismissals and even monetary settlements from Jordin due to alleged inhospitable living conditions at his properties.

RANGE scoured court documents from every single eviction Jordin initiated after 2005, when Spokane started digitizing their court records, and the same year Washington filed rape charges against him. We found 222 evictions, 189 from before right-to-counsel laws were implemented.

The cases reveal a pattern of evictions over small sums of money.

In August of 2012, he evicted a woman named Danielle for $150 of unpaid rent and alleged drug activities. She submitted a paper copy of a receipt showing she’d paid the $150 a week after Jordin’s lawyer filed an eviction against her, but Danielle had no lawyer, choosing instead to represent herself in court, and by the end of the month, sheriff’s officers had evicted Danielle from her residence.

That same year, he evicted a man named Mike who was up-to-date on rent, but hadn’t paid the pet fee of $700 Jordin was charging.

In April of 2013, Jordin evicted a woman named Beverly over even less — just $45 of alleged unpaid rent.

Excluding cases where tenants were evicted for reasons besides unpaid rent, and cases after April of 2021 — when right-to-counsel laws were implemented — the average amount of unpaid rent Jordin evicted tenants for was $797.53. In some cases, that didn’t even amount to a full month’s worth of rent.

Almost none of those tenants had lawyers. Across all his cases from before right-to-counsel, we could only find three where the tenant had legal representation. Two of those three tenants got the evictions dismissed.

This changed dramatically with right-to-counsel: when paired with free lawyers, tenants began to win their cases against Jordin.

This trend holds statewide: according to stats the Northwest Justice Project shared in December of 2024, since right-to-counsel was enacted, just 15% of cases with court-appointed lawyers resulted in eviction orders. Data from the Washington Office of Civil Legal Aid shows the program is helping create long-term housing stability for tenants, not just stays of execution, with 81% of closed cases resulting in permanent housing being secured and 56% of cases ending with tenants being able to stay in their residence.

Locally, the Spokane City Council has moved to pass multiple renter protection policies: a law requiring six months of notification prior to any rent raise over 3% of a tenant’s total rent, and requiring landlords to obtain a business license and register their rentals on a citywide registry before raising rent or evicting tenants. And this year, the state legislature finally passed rent stabilization, capping annual rent raises at 10% or 7% plus inflation.

All these regulations, local and statewide, give right-to-counsel lawyers more tools to fight for the best outcome for their tenant, like in a recent eviction case: Arlin Jordin v. Lisa Brayman.

Across at least two years and six court filings, Jordin has tried to evict Lisa Brayman — a tenant of an old mansion on the lower South Hill that he’d purchased and converted to eight units in the early 2000s — and collect payment for multiple years of unpaid rent. But this time, the woman had secured lawyers through the right-to-counsel program.

Those lawyers had successfully fended off six eviction filings from Jordin.

After the seventh attempt, Brayman’s lawyer Hannah Swenson, the managing attorney of King County Bar Association Housing Justice Project’s Spokane office, pushed for a trial before a jury — likely the first of its kind in Spokane since right-to-counsel was implemented.

On Tuesday, September 2, following the seventh filing, Jordin found himself back in front of a jury for the first time in decades, arguing via Zoom from the Monroe Correctional Complex near Seattle that Brayman owed him nearly $40,000 in unpaid rent and needed to leave his property.

Brant Stevens, Jordin’s lawyer, described the case as “straightforward.” Swenson, Brayman’s attorney, felt differently:

“If this case was as simple as Mr. Stevens and Arlin Jordin hoped, we wouldn’t be here today, we wouldn’t have made it all the way to trial.”

‘A literal dumpster fire.’

There are complex legal terms to describe Swenson’s defenses for Brayman, like “equity abhors a forfeiture,” “unclean-hands doctrine,” and “the implied warrant of habitability,” but for the layperson unfamiliar with case law and precedents, her arguments boiled down to this: Jordin wasn’t fulfilling his responsibilities as a landlord, so how could a tenant be expected to hold up their end of the bargain?

‘Substandard’

1827 W 9th Ave. Photo by Ben Tobin. Jordin’s properties, including the one Brayman lived in, have habitability issues, Swenson argued.

Code enforcement officers who testified at the trial described inspecting the building in late 2024 and seeing dilapidation, water damage, inadequate or inoperable heating systems, overflowing dumpsters, a leaking water heater and exposed wiring, among other issues at 1827 W 9th Avenue where Brayman lives.

“The property is in our substandard building process and the owner has hired a new contractor to take over large-scale repairs in response to Code’s efforts,” city spokesperson Erin Hut wrote in an email. “Neighbors have consistently been reporting issues over the last two years to try and get it designated as a chronic nuisance property, but that has not happened.”

There was a code enforcement hearing in October of 2024, which Jordin didn’t attend. He was given 60 days to submit a plan to remedy the issues, which he did, but Code Enforcement found his plan inadequate.

By the time of the trial, almost a full year after that hearing, Jordin had still not addressed the code violations. He made a bit of progress though — in August of 2025, just weeks before the trial began, he finally hired a licensed and bonded contractor to conduct the repairs.

The habitability issues at 1827 were far from the first at a Jordin property.

In 2014, Jordin made headlines for the first time since his case concluded when the Spokane Fire Department declared his building at 1311 W. 9th Avenue “substandard,” citing “inoperable fire alarm system, exposed electrical wiring, water leaks, inadequate weatherproofing and defective heating systems.”

Jordin resisted paying for repairs, tenants at the time told The Spokesman-Review.

It was mid-November of that year, withthe average temperature in Spokane hitting a high of 40 degrees, when tenants were given 24-hours notice to leave Jordin’s building, leaving some of them homeless.

Meanwhile, tenants described Jordin as “just sitting behind bars collecting money.”

From the day he was charged in his rape case to present, Jordin has opened over 220 eviction cases against tenants across his real estate holdings — nearly 50 units when he went to prison, and now closer to 24. Evicting tenants isn’t just a prison cell hobby; before his arrest, Jordin had opened civil actions against more than 100 tenants, most of them women.

A landlord has duties, Swenson argued, like the duty to keep the premises safe and habitable.

In the state of Washington, there are 15 duties outlined by law that landlords have to meet in order to “keep the premises fit for human habitation.” Some of those responsibilities include maintaining the roof and foundations, keeping common areas clean and sanitary, providing adequate locks, making reasonable repairs and ensuring electricity, plumbing and heating are supplied.

If there is no hot water, like tenants in 2014 described, or the doors don’t lock, like Brayman and Jordin’s own property manager testified to, or the dumpster is constantly overflowing, like the Code Enforcement officers observed, the landlord isn’t holding up their end of the bargain, and tenants may be entitled to offsets, like a settlement or a write-off of rent due.

‘If I had a choice,’

From the day she moved in, her unit had issues, Brayman told the court: black water coming up the shower drain, wires melted under her stove that prevented the oven from turning on, a leak from the building’s roof that caused a musky smell.

She moved in despite the unit’s flaws.

“I was homeless,” Brayman said. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t have moved into this house, I wouldn’t have exposed my kids to this kind of environment.”

Living in the small unit was stressful. One of her dogs died during a heat wave after drinking the black water backed up in her shower, Brayman said. The building itself had no locks for a large chunk of time, which Brayman said caused break ins and drug use in common spaces.

She filed a complaint to Code Enforcement in 2021, but when they came to inspect the building in 2024 — despite noting major issues in the building as a whole — they said they found no severe habitability issues in her unit.

Jordin argued that because her unit specifically had no Code Enforcement issues, Brayman wasn’t entitled to rent offsets.

Though he hasn’t been to the old mansion in almost two decades, Jordin maintained that the property at 1827 was still in good condition.

“I haven’t seen it for a while,” Jordin said during the trial. “Everything works, it just needs updated.”

The city currently has active substandard building cases open against all three of the properties Jordin still owns: 1302 W Boone Ave, 1308 W Boone and 1827 W 9th.

1308 W Boone Ave, 2019 to present

All-Star Property Management

While Jordin ultimately makes the decision on whether or not to evict tenants, he does so based on the reporting from his longtime accountant, or his property manager of the respective property.

Some of his property managers are tenant-employees, living in his buildings and managing them. Many of them show up later in eviction filings, like Mike McGuire, a property manager evicted by Jordin in 2012, Shelley Hagelstein, evicted by Jordin in 2014 after he claimed she kept almost $2,000 in deposits from other tenants and Tim Roullier, a tenant-employee evicted in 2011 who claimed Jordin hadn’t paid him in two weeks.

Roullier, in his response to the court, also claimed Jordin had cycled through five managers in four years and was withholding the pay his rent was typically deducted from.

“Arlin will never pay and is not truthful,” Roullier wrote. “I have a family, four children and two granddaughters. He owes me.”

Roullier’s story was reflected more than a dozen years later during Brayman’s trial when Swenson called Jason Thies to the stand.

Thies, one of the two property managers at 1827 W 9th Ave, was primarily a handyman who lived at the building while fixing maintenance issues. He also helped serve eviction notices. A few weeks before Brayman’s trial began, Thies returned home to his unit to find Jordin’s new contractor had changed the locks, leaving Thies without a job or a home.

“There wasn’t any paperwork trail eviction for me,” he said.

Jordin described it differently: “I just told him to find a place he liked better. He just didn’t seem to be very happy.”

Besides high turnover, there are other problems with Jordin’s property managers: they aren’t always honest.

In 2014, Jordin’s attorney at the time, Neil Humphries, said that many of the issues with Jordin’s properties were the responsibility of managers who had stolen rent money and lied about doing repairs.

“People pay deposits and pay rent, and it never gets turned in to the bookkeeper,” Humphries told The Spokesman.

In Brayman’s own case, tenant-property manager Regeena Vaughn — the sole witness called in the plaintiff’s case — may have perjured herself.

A central pillar of Swenson’s case against Jordin was conflicting rent ledgers and 14-day notices introduced during the previous eviction cases against Brayman. One ledger said Brayman’s rent was $1,045 a month, another said $945. Some of the notices listed her monthly rent at anywhere between $595 and $5,121. The two most commonly cited ledgers show a rent hike of either 59% or 76%, both of which would have been illegal, if Washington’s rent stabilization had passed a few years earlier.

How could Brayman actually pay her back rent, Swenson argued, if she had no idea how much she was supposed to pay? And how could Jordin be trusted to prove she wasn’t paying to begin with, if his record-keeping and rental ledgers were so shoddy?

In December 2024, Vaughn testified under oath to the accuracy of the $1,045 ledger, but during Brayman’s jury trial, testified the $945 ledger was accurate and claimed she couldn’t remember testifying in December and wasn’t sure if she even did.

(“If you can’t remember what happened in a hearing in December, how do you remember what happened in 2021?” Swenson asked her.)

But perhaps the biggest red flag on Jordin’s history with property managers is All-Star Property Management.

In 2023, All-Star Property Management, which Jordin had hired to handle his properties at least since 2021, was accused by multiple tenants of fraudulently obtaining federal COVID-19 rental assistance dollars. The company was accused of seeking funding for more than 30 tenants who were not eligible, falsely inflating rent amounts for tenants who were eligible, claiming tenants who were up-to-date on rent had past due payments and filing for COVID-19 assistance on tenants’ behalf, even after they had moved out.

The case was brought by Northwest Justice Project on behalf of Krystal Jeffries, one of Jordin’s tenants who All-Star Property Management had tried to evict for nonpayment of rent two years earlier (a right-to-counsel attorney had helped her settle, allowing her to leave on her own terms.)

“I had nowhere to go. I had three dogs. I cleaned up the living area best I could and blocked off the bathroom,” Jeffries wrote in a testimonial about the building’s septic system backing up into her unit. “After a certain point I stopped paying rent because the place was unlivable. When I complained, they served me an eviction notice for nonpayment of rent … Not long after, I got an email that said, ‘Your landlord has received your check.’ All-Star had gotten a check for $16,000 for back rent—submitted in my name! But I had never applied.”

The Northwest Justice Project believed her, and took her case up against All-Star and Jordin.

Six months later, All-Star Property Management settled with the federal government for more than $300,000.

Though the settlement states Jordin received an over-payment of COVID-19 funds he was not entitled to, Jordin maintains that he had no knowledge All-Star Property Management was committing fraud. He was ordered to pay about $20,000, which the property management company agreed to cover.

Jeffries herself received $68,000 of the total settlement.

“I’m thankful I was listened to. When you’re low income, like me, people don’t care, but they actually listened to me. They believed me, believed in me,” Jeffries wrote. “When I found out I would get $68,000, I wanted to cry. I want to put a down payment on a forever place. I want to have a tree. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

All-Star Property Management was the same company managing 1827 W 9th Ave when Brayman said she began receiving rent hike notices.

As a low-income tenant, Brayman herself may have qualified for the federal pandemic rent assistance. Swenson said she doesn’t know for sure if Brayman ever applied, but from the stand, Brayman implied that was the case.

“I don’t plan on staying in this position, but that money was supposed to come to me to get me compensated for my losses and displacement,” she said.

However, no evidence was ever introduced to prove whether or not she did apply or was impacted by All-Star Property Management’s fraud.

Still, because the company admitted to falsifying back rent amounts in the settlement, Swenson both argued this made Jordin’s hands “unclean,” – a legal precedent meaning Jordin would be ineligible to recover funds from Brayman due to his own unethical behavior — and made Brayman’s back due balance suspect, because much of it was accumulated under All-Star’s management.

‘Everybody needs a place to live’

Lisa Brayman was not a perfect tenant.

She has few assets and no steady income. After one of her dogs died, she was depressed, so she decided to hatch chickens inside her apartment.

“I adopted six eggs and in 21 days I delivered a really cool chicken,” Brayman said to the court. “It gave me something to smile about … I don’t regret it.”

When she took the stand, wearing a white t-shirt that said “Nope, Not Today,” she didn’t deny the fact that she had not paid rent at Jordin’s property for four years.

Even before 2021, Brayman’s rental history paints a picture of financial instability with multiple eviction cases. Six of those were Jordin’s earlier attempts to get her out, but others were from prior landlords. In 2015, she was evicted from a property in North Spokane over $1,680 in unpaid rent. Two years later, she was evicted from a residence in Airway Heights over nonpayment of rent.

“Defendants have not ever paid a full month rent payment ever, and have paid nothing for the months of May, June or July,” the landlord from that case claimed.

After that eviction, Brayman said she was left homeless. She had serious mental health issues that left her unable to work. Her options for housing were limited.

She was exactly the kind of tenant Jordin attracts and caters to.

Slumlord

Because he does not require credit or background checks, low-income tenants with past evictions or criminal records often find one of Jordin’s three remaining properties their only available choice.

These renters are the classic prey for slumlords: if tenants have no other options and no money to hire a lawyer to defend them, they’re at the mercy of a landlord who has no incentive to keep their unit livable and safe, and who can kick them to the curb with no recourse.

According to reporting from *The Spokesman Review,*a former Jordin tenant wrote an anonymous blog post in 2007 about her experiences with Jordin, titled “A Tale of My Old Landlord, the Convicted Rapist.” She raised the class dynamic inherent in Jordin’s mini rental empire and his criminal activity, after he was released on a $100,000 bond following his second-degree rape conviction.

“Only a rich man would be walking the streets after a conviction like that,” she wrote. “He likes to drug and rape young women in his fancy South Hill apartment. … He has made his money renting out the crappiest apartments in Spokane to the poorest of the poor.”

Arlin Jordin. Courtesy of WA State Department of Corrections That power dynamic has long played out in the halls of Jordin’s properties.

In the early years, before Jordin went to prison, he would often interview tenants from his own apartment at 1827 W 9th Ave, the same building Brayman would later live in. Jordin placed ads in The Spokesman Review for his open rental units. When potential tenants would respond, he often invited them over to his apartment to interview them.

“I thought this might be his way of screening potential clients,” a woman who would later accuse Jordin of rape, told Spokesmanreporter Thomas Clouse in 2004.

The first night she went to his apartment, nothing untoward happened — she had to leave after one drink to meet up with friends. But Jordin was persistent, calling her multiple times, offering her tours and telling her that even though she’d just found a different place with a friend, it couldn’t hurt to tour his units.

After the two drinks Jordin offered her, she woke up the next morning naked in his bed.

After his arrest, more than 50 women contacted the Spokane Police Department (SPD) with their own stories of feeling ill after taking a drink Jordin offered. From those reports, SPD identified eight women they believed had been drugged and raped.

At his trial, his daughter said Jordin loved to host and would routinely offer his guests food and drink — his specialty was a margarita recipe he learned in Mexico.

Jordin, to this day, says he never drugged any women, but he has never disputed that he would offer potential women tenants alcohol when they came to talk rentals. Sometimes, he said during his trial, he would have sexual relations with them.

Housing advocates at the time had identified other distressing patterns. In December of 2004, the executive director of the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance told reporters they’d received a number of complaints about Jordin. The most egregious example was a woman who had changed her mind about renting from Jordin.

When she went to his apartment to get her deposit back, she said he met her wearing only a blue terry cloth robe and made sexual advances towards her.

In the same article, Bryce Watson, one of Jordin’s property managers, said he’d heard claims from women tenants that Jordin had offered to let them pay with sex.

“If anybody complained, he would threaten eviction,” Watson said the tenants told him.

‘I don’t get to pick my tenants.’

After he was incarcerated, Jordin continued to exercise his power over his tenants through eviction proceedings. From his cell, Jordin decides if his tenants will have a roof over their heads or not.

“Since becoming incarcerated, it’s been hard because I don’t get to pick my tenants,” Jordin said.

Because he doesn’t get to interview tenants like he used to — inviting them over for drinks at his apartment to get to know them — he is more likely to end up with tenants who are untrustworthy or unable to pay rent, he said. He thinks he’s evicted more people than the average landlord as a result.

It was April of 2018 when Lisa Brayman moved into the unit at 1827 W 9th Avenue — the same building where Jordin once lived. The same building where he committed the rape he was convicted of.

“If I had known who the owner was, me and my son wouldn’t have stepped foot in that property,” Brayman said from the witness stand.

But she had nowhere else to go. Like the tenants who came before, Brayman found herself under Arlin Jordin’s thumb.

“Being a landlord is the perfect line of work. Everybody needs a place to live … including single women going through stressful changes in their lives,” wrote Gregory Newell Smith, the husband of one of Jordin’s victims whose case SPD didn’t choose to prosecute, in an unpublished manuscript.

“Sooner or later they come to him.”

‘Accomplice’

Since becoming the managing attorney at KCBA Housing Justice in October of 2024, Hannah Swenson has personally taken at least six breach of habitability claims against Jordin for tenants. Her firm has litigated more than 20 cases against Jordin since 2023.

“It is never-ending,” she said in an interview.

When there are habitability issues, like at Jordin’s properties, right-to-counsel lawyers can fight for settlements, which Swenson has been able to secure for clients in some cases.

“Sometimes that’s what someone needs to actually get out and be able to go find somewhere safe to go,” she said.

For a resident of Jordin’s 1308 W Boone property who was being charged with over $16,000 in back rent, Swenson negotiated a settlement where Jordin paid her client $4,000 and gave them a month to move out.

In another case at the property next door, 1302 W Boone, Jordin claimed a pair of tenants owed over $20,000. There were severe habitability issues: Swenson herself witnessed black mold when she went to meet with her clients.

1302 W Boone Ave, with the words “RIP Brix,” graffitied on the boarded up door. Photo by Ben Tobin. “After 20 minutes I walked out with my lungs hurting,” she said. “Those sorts of basic, undeniable effects on your health and how you function can affect your whole life.”

By the end of the case, Jordin had signed a settlement agreement to pay them $3,500 and give them six weeks to move out.

These kinds of victories aren’t going unpunished.

“It is not uncommon, when I’m litigating against Arlin Jordin, to receive anonymous threats, or hearing that his employees want to bash my face in,” Swenson said.

Testifying virtually at Brayman’s eviction hearing from the Monroe Correctional Complex, Jordin referred to Swenson both as “sweetheart,” and then as Brayman’s “accomplice.”

When asked why he chose that word, Jordin said it was intentional: he believes Swenson and other right-to-counsel attorneys are helping tenants steal from him.

The lawyers don’t have to help tenants, Jordin said, they’re choosing to do it, and by dragging cases out and allowing nonpaying tenants to stay in his units for longer, he’s losing money. He believes the pendulum has swung too far in favor of renters.

“People end up not paying rent and getting away with it, like Lisa Brayman. It discourages people from building houses and renting it out,” Jordin said. “All I have to sell is rent. I’m not selling wheat or toys or vegetables, which would be against the law to steal that but she’s allowed to steal rent from me and my family.”

Before the new laws, the landlord had all the power, Jordin said, “Now the tenant does.”

Hannah Swenson, outside the courtroom. Photo by Sandra Rivera. But when Swenson sees the low-income tenants who are referred to her law office, she doesn’t see people with power. She sees vulnerable people, people who need help “telling their side of what happened.” People who, without legal representation, could find themselves standing on the sidewalk with everything they own in trash bags after a forcible eviction from police.

“ We’re talking about these vulnerable groups. We’re talking about people who potentially are financially unstable,” she said. “ They don’t have a community around them who’s gonna catch them if they need help, and that makes predatory landlords very dangerous.”

Even facing an eviction filing can be “life-altering,” Swenson told InvestigateWest earlier this summer, especially for low-income households that receive support from the federal Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly known as Section 8. “Getting an eviction boots them from the program and can make them ineligible for the benefits in the future.”

And even if a tenant wins their case, the eviction could still show up on their record, making it harder to find a new place to live.

“The thing about housing and eviction is it’s a continuum and it’s a cycle. That’s why we often have repeat clients. You can’t get out of the system,” Swenson said. “ Once you’re in it, it’s so hard to climb out.”

Locally, Swenson and firms like KCBA Housing Justice Project and the Northwest Justice Project are looking for proactive ways to stop people from being evicted in the first place. Twice a month, attorneys from KCBA Housing Justice Project meet tenants at risk of eviction, conducting pre-eviction screenings and looking for ways to avoid a filing.

“We’re trying to get to people as soon as they have a [14-day] notice, to provide representation at that stage,” Swenson said. “I think we can prevent so many filings.”

The verdict

Brayman’s case in particular, Swenson said, has highlighted the importance of the right-to-counsel program.

“Without right-to-counsel, slumlords like Arlin Jordan threaten and pursue illegal eviction to tenants and seek to profit from it,” Swenson said. “All while making tenants live in deplorable conditions and in fear of maintaining housing. Accountability matters.”

For three days, Swenson defended Brayman, highlighting Jordin’s shoddy ledger-keeping, the breadth of code enforcement issues at his properties and hinting at his untrustworthy character in every way she could — she was barred from bringing up his past conviction.

None of it was enough.

On Friday morning, three days after the trial began, a jury of her peers voted to evict Brayman and force her to pay back rent to Arlin Jordin.

The pivotal moment came on Wednesday afternoon when Judge Annette Plese read out loud a question the jury had submitted in writing:

“Why would you not find a new place to live after seven years of poor conditions?”

“Because of the economy,” Brayman answered, before launching into a meandering statement about the conditions that caused her to lose her housing in the 2010s and led to her taking the unit at Jordin’s building.

“It’s a very human question to have,” Swenson said. “But in my mind it’s similar to when someone says, ‘Why doesn’t a [domestic violence] victim just go?’ Not to conflate the situations, but the populations we’re talking about are often very vulnerable. They don’t have access to the resources that they need and that society thinks they’re getting, like disability or housing benefits or mental health support, or even education to know what their rights are and what their responsibilities are as a tenant.”

The verdict wasn’t a complete victory for Jordin, however. While the jury mostly decided in his favor, they also voted that Brayman was entitled to a reduction of the back rent Jordin said he was owed because he violated the warrant of habitability.

Of the $36,855 Jordin said he was owed, the jury voted to write off $21,262 of that, leaving Brayman on the hook for just $15,593 — about $338 in monthly rent for each of the 46 months Brayman had lived rent free.

The trial was a “huge culmination,” of tenant rights work across the state, Swenson said, revealing both gaps in service and testing the willingness of a jury to hold landlords accountable for poor living conditions.

Despite their verdict, “ I got the sense that this trial was pretty illuminating for many of the jury into the complexities of landlord-tenant relationships in Spokane,” Swenson said.

“I don’t think anyone felt good about evicting [Brayman]. They indicated to me that they felt like they had to uphold what they understood to be the law,” she added. “ My understanding is it was hard for them to overlook the sheer amount of time that we were talking about.”

For four years, Brayman has lived rent-free in Jordin’s building. Now, with just $200 and a 2000 Ford Explorer to her name, Brayman will likely need to find a new place to live.

Though a writ of restitution has been signed by Plese, allowing the sheriff’s office to physically return the unit to Jordin, Brayman has yet to be evicted. Swenson wrote in an email that Brayman is working to file an appeal with the Court of Appeals, and that KCBA Housing Justice Project connected her with community organizations who may be able to help her find emergency shelter.

Arlin Jordin is nearing the end of his sentence at Monroe Correctional Complex, where he is eligible for release next year. In the meantime, he’s continuing to evict tenants.

For Swenson, the resolution of the case highlights the fundamental gap between landlords and their tenants:

While Brayman frantically tries to maintain housing, “Jordin, in prison, is afforded the rights he tries to strip his tenants of,” Swenson wrote.

“His right to working plumbing is upheld, heat that works, and safety from harm. Those basic protections are deserved by every human, including and especially his own tenants.”